The intensive care unit (ICU) of a medical facility may be a data rich environment. ICU patients usually have significant organ system derangement and may have very little physiologic reserve. Effective medical care may require intensive monitoring of organ function, frequent multimodal diagnostic testing, and many consultations from subspecialty physicians and other health care providers. In this kind of a critical care environment, it is often difficult to make rapid evaluations of a patient's condition due to the overwhelming volume of data that is continuously generated. Sources of patient-generated data may include continuous automatic physiologic monitoring and intermittently determined data that is gathered by bedside care providers and/or from various diagnostic testing sources. In addition to patient-generated data, there may be vast arrays of clinical data generated that document the treatment received by the patient. This data may include drug therapy, respiratory therapy, physical therapy and/or all other clinical interventions.
Effective clinical decisions pertaining to the care of these patients may be made when physicians can easily organize and understand the vast flood of data from these various sources. Unfortunately, physicians and other health care staff typically have to retrieve this critical data from multiple locations and organize it into a cohesive profile of the patient's current condition. Furthermore, the data retrieved from these diverse sources is usually presented in a form that does not allow trends and relationships between co-variables to be immediately recognized. Further, critical care physicians (CCP) work in a highly stressful environment and are usually pressed for time, frequently looking after several critically ill patients. As a result, the process of monitoring, evaluating and treating complex medical problems is labor intensive and time-consuming; it demands that physicians analyze data in text and numeric form.